Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,174
at Rosie, and as I was rolling around on the floor with my wife and my kids and the dog is barking at us from the other room, I watched the scene, almost from above, like I was observing it and living it at the same time, and I thought, I love my fucking family.”
He basks in the thought for a second before continuing.
“I felt the happiest I’ve been in a long time,” he says. “And you know what? Margo and I actually had a really nice night together after that. So much of the tension that’s normally between us was gone.” John smiles at the memory. “But then,” John continues, “I don’t know what happened. I’ve been sleeping much better, but that night I was up for hours thinking about what Margo said about my being an asshole. I couldn’t get it out of my head. Because I know you don’t think I’m an asshole. I mean, you obviously like me. So then I thought, Wait, what if Margo’s right? What if I’m an asshole but you can’t see it? Then you really are an idiot therapist. So which is it—am I an asshole, or are you an idiot?”
What a trap, I think. Either I say he’s an asshole or I claim I’m an idiot. I think of Julie and the phrase that her friends wrote in her high-school yearbook: I choose neither.
“Maybe there’s a third possibility,” I suggest.
“I want the truth,” he says adamantly. A mentor once remarked that often in therapy, change happens “gradually, then suddenly,” and that might be true for John too. I imagine that as John tossed and turned in bed, unable to sleep, the house of cards he’d built for himself about how everyone else was an idiot came crashing down, and now he’s left with the wreckage: I’m an asshole. I’m not better than everyone else—special. My mom was wrong.
But that’s not the truth either. It’s simply the collapse of the narcissistic defense in the form of an overcorrection. John started out with the belief that “I’m good and you’re bad,” and now it’s being turned upside down—“You’re good and I’m bad.” Neither is right.
“The truth as I see it,” I say honestly, “is not that I’m an idiot or you’re an asshole but that sometimes in order to protect yourself, you act like one.”
I watch John for his reaction. He takes a breath and seems like he’s about to say something flip but then decides not to. He’s quiet for a minute, gazing at Rosie, who has fallen asleep.
“Yeah,” he says. “I do act like an asshole.” Then he smiles and adds, “Sometimes.”
Recently John and I talked about the beauty of the word sometimes, how sometimes evens us out, keeps us in the comfortable middle rather than dangling on one end of the spectrum or the other, hanging on for dear life. It helps us escape from the tyranny of black-or-white thinking. John said that when he was struggling with the pressure of his marriage and his career, he used to think that there’d be a point when he’d be happy again, and then when Gabe died, he thought he’d never be happy again. Now, he says, he’s come to feel it’s not either/or, yes or no, always or never.
“Maybe happiness is sometimes,” he says, leaning back on the sofa. It’s an idea that brings him relief. “I guess it couldn’t hurt to try that couples therapist,” John adds, referring to the one Wendell apparently suggested. Margo and John had gone to couples therapy for a few sessions after Gabe died, but they were both so furious and ashamed—alternately blaming each other and themselves—that even when the therapist brought up the police report on the drunk driver as a contributing factor in the accident, John had no interest in what he called the “pointless postmortem.” If Margo wanted therapy, he was all for it, but he saw no reason to prolong his own torture for an hour each week.
But now, he explains, he’s agreeing to couples therapy because he’s lost so much—his mom, his son, maybe even himself—and he wants to fight to keep Margo before it’s too late.
In that spirit, recently he and Margo have begun—tentatively, delicately—to talk about Gabe, but also about many other things. They’re learning who they are at this point in their lives and what that means going forward. And whatever the outcome, maybe, John reasons, a couples therapist can help.